About succeeding in car salesThis is about my story but it could be your story because its how I went from out of work to a successful career in car sales by doing it differently that most others in the business. I started in the car business just before the major economic meltdown (2008) that changed the car business (and most other businesses) forever. The financial crisis and the dawn of the digital media age coincided with some major upheavals. Facebook was founded in 2004 but started to become a force in the 2007 2010 time frame (going public in 2012). A year later (2005), YouTube was launched and was soon acquired by Google (2006). I started in the automotive business in 2007 so I was originally taught the old school techniques that car sales professionals had been using for literally 100 years. As social media exploded and car shoppers were able to access most of the information they needed online, the old car sales approaches became less and less effective. When I watched what the most successful sales team members were doing and what customers told me were the most important elements of their car buying decision, I realized that what I had been learning about car sales did not line up with what was being taught at the dealership (even though I was having some level of success). Customers were no longer tolerating vague promises and deceptive techniques. And, as a guy with a marketing background and training, I looked for the most successful sales professionals in the business to see if there was a secret that I could grab onto. It turned out, the most successful had developed a continuous flow of customers who were pre-qualified and pre-conditioned to buy. The successful old-school professionals did this over decades of building a network of past clients that they kept in touch with. But I didnt have decades. I needed to figure out how to leapfrog my colleagues and get people coming to the dealership and asking for me. Great sales skills are important but you need a steady stream of prospects that are already receptive to your message. Thats where Marketing comes in and thats where I knew I could create an advantage where most of my colleagues (and most of your colleagues) come up short. Marketing works on the principle of positioning and attraction where potential customers are provided with compelling reasons to come to you (and even seek you out) as opposed to you chasing prospects. In another time (before the internet), Joe Girard had taken this attraction approach and used it to achieve (at the time) the Guinness Book of World Records for the most retail car sales by a single person. Joe sold 13,001 cars at a Chevrolet dealership in the Detroit area between 1963 and 1978. (Yes, thats close to a thousand cars a year on average).I became convinced that Girards approach, if updated and fine-tuned to the 21st Century digital age, could be the secret formula for tapping into a sales windfall. I believed that if I started applying the sales and marketing techniques that were new to the auto retail industry by leveraging digital technologies and the internet plus email marketing and snail mail marketing to set myself apart from the rest of the salespeople at the dealership, I would gain an edge that others on the sales floor could not duplicate. And that is exactly what happened. Now, let me share how I leveraged a career in traditional corporate marketing and mastered the current digital communications tools to generate my own store traffic and build a successful car sales career. I spent a decade perfecting these systems but you can leapfrog that trial and error grief by tapping into my methods. Gordon N. Wright
